Lantern Sam and the Blue Streak Bandits (18 page)

In the opposite corner of the car were two unoccupied tables. At the center of each flickered an authentic railroad lantern, so I hightailed it to the one farthest from the spitters and jumped aboard. The lantern’s wick was turned down low, so it wasn’t very bright, but it still gave off a surprising amount of heat, which was all I was interested in. I lay down on the table, curled my lanky body around that miniature furnace, and drifted off to dreamland.

My memory of what happened next is a little fuzzy, so I’ve had to rely on Clarence to fill in some of the gory details, especially those leading up to the moment I found myself buried in a snowdrift outside the Boxcar Tavern.

According to Clarence, it was François who first noticed something odd.

“What the devil’s that
smell
?” he asked the men around the potbelly stove. “I’ve told you a hundred times: you can’t take your shoes off in here. Those feet o’ yours’ll kill somebody.”

“It ain’t us,” said one. “We all got our shoes on. You sure
yours
are on? Seems to me it’s your feet what peeled the paint off the ceiling.”

“Holy cats!” said another. “It ain’t feet—it’s that dang cat of Clarence’s!”

In my dreams, I was a guest at a country estate, curled up on a hearthrug before a blazing fire after a long day of hunting.

In reality, I was on fire.

Whether someone intentionally turned up the wick on the lantern (as I have always suspected) or not, we will never know. No one was willing to admit to tampering with the lantern, and at the moment it would have happened, I was too busy enjoying my fantasy life to notice if someone was trying to kill me. Whatever the case,
somehow
that stupid lantern got so hot that the fur on my belly started to smoke—and not just a little. Clarence said that when he first looked over at me, so much smoke was pouring off me that he couldn’t believe there were no flames.

“Water!” he bellowed at François.

In the meantime, a couple of the potbelly stove warriors pushed me away from the lantern. I opened my eyes just in time to watch the first of them dump the entire disgusting contents of a spittoon over my belly, followed a moment later by a second man, whose spittoon was filled even closer to the top than the first.

Dripping with tobacco juice and who knows what else, I
was too shocked to fight back. “Ack! Eeuuckkk! Aaauggghhhh. What is—”

Before I could finish cursing at them, Clarence reached me with the bucket of soapy water that François kept behind the bar and dumped
it
over me. Then he carried me to the front door by the scruff of my neck and tossed me into the nearest snowdrift to make sure that the fire was really out.

The temperature outside the Boxcar Tavern that night was six degrees below zero, so it doesn’t take much imagination to picture me as I crawled out of that drift. In seconds, all that tobacco juice and soapy water froze so solidly that I could barely move, and I had to be rescued by Clarence once more. He took me back inside and held me directly in front of the potbelly stove until I thawed out enough that he could start to clean me up with François’s bar rag, which smelled only slightly better than the contents of the two spittoons I was wearing.

Clarence looked down at me and smiled as the fur on my belly came out in soggy, charred clumps. “I think you just used up one of your lives, Sam, old boy. Maybe two. You know, I think we’ll call you
Lantern
Sam from now on. Has a nice ring to it.”

For the next twenty minutes, nobody in that stuffy, crowded room said a word. Connie and Ty weren’t speaking to each other, and with our mouths crammed full of hankies, Ellie and I didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter. The
clackety-clackety-clackety
of the wheels and the gentle rocking of the car threatened to lull me to sleep; it was well past my bedtime and it had been a long day. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and magically wake up in my own bed, with the smell of griddle cakes and bacon filling the air.

What had happened to Sam? It was hard to believe that it was taking so long to find Clarence and get him to open the door. In all the excitement and confusion, I had lost track of the time, but I knew it had to be well after nine
o’clock; that dinner with Mother and Jessica was only a distant memory. Meanwhile, I was beginning to imagine the “wow finish” to the story: Clarence and some of the porters breaking down the door in a hail of machine-gun fire, maybe even a hand grenade or two. Sam swinging in on a rope, his own tommy gun blazing. Connie and Ty refusing to give up without a fight, bullets whizzing past my ears in both directions. At least that’s how it would happen in
Dick Tracy
.

I had skinned my knee a few days earlier, and the scab was starting to itch. With a little effort, I was able to reach the area with my handcuffed hands, which is when I felt something in my pants pocket: the sardine can key.
If
I could get it out of the pocket without Connie or Ty noticing anything, I knew that it would be possible to open handcuffs with it—at least that’s what I’d read in
Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang
.

Ty checked his watch about every ten seconds, it seemed. He was the one to break the silence. “Just a few more minutes to North East. Finally. I can’t wait to get off this bucket of bolts. You ready?”

“Been ready,” said Connie. “How about these two? Double-check all the ropes and make sure those cuffs are on nice and tight. Don’t need any surprises.”

Ty lifted our wrists and tugged on the cuffs.

“Ow,” I said as he tried to squeeze my hand through the opening. I was glad I hadn’t gotten the key out of my pocket.

“They’re not going anywhere,” he announced.

“Maybe we ought to give them both a shot of that special beddy-bye juice, just to be sure. They’d sleep all the way to Chicago.”

I shook my head as hard as I could. “No! ’E’ll ’e ’uiet!”

Connie smiled sweetly at me. Well, she
tried
to smile sweetly. It actually came out looking more like a sneer. “Okay, kid, I’m going to trust you. Once we’re off this train, it’s not going to matter anyway. Well, you kids have a nice ride to Chicago. I’m sure they’ll find you in the morning when they come through to clean everything. That is, unless Rin Tin Tin comes to rescue you first. Oh, sorry … looks like he forgot you.” She laughed in my face and turned toward the door.

“Is Rin Tin Tin really on the train?” asked Ty, closing the door as they stepped into the hall.

With Connie and Ty out of sight, my thoughts turned to the sardine key in my pants pocket. Somehow I
had
to get it out, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Not only were our wrists squeezed together into one pair of handcuffs, but the chain also ran through the steel frame of the seat. I couldn’t move my hands more than a few inches in any direction, so I had
no choice—I had to get the pocket closer to my hands. To do that, we had to twist our bodies around so that our faces were mere inches apart. If someone had walked in at that moment, I would have dropped dead from embarrassment, because it looked like I was trying to kiss Ellie. Blindly, I pushed my fingertips into the pocket and fished around for the key, which, naturally, had dropped into the deepest, farthest corner.

After an eternity in that awkward, uncomfortable position, I was able to get one finger on the key and slowly drag it upward until I could get it between my fingertips and start to pull it to safety. I finally held it up triumphantly for Ellie to see.

“Wha’s ’at?”

“ ’Ardine ’ey.” With my right hand, I stuck the end of the key into the lock of the handcuff that held my left and Ellie’s right hand and started wiggling it around. I’d seen people escape from handcuffs a million times in the pictures—how hard could it be?

I wiggled. I jiggled. I twisted and I turned, and nothing happened. Discouraged, I took a deep breath, relaxed my fingers, and tried again. Still nothing. Maybe it wasn’t as simple as they made it seem in the movies.

“ ’Et ’e ’ry,” said Ellie, holding her hand out for the key.

“Okay, ’ut ’on’t ’rop it,” I warned. The Shoreliner was
speeding toward its next stop, and time was running out. Doggone that Sam—where was he?

Ellie’s face was a picture of concentration. Since she was right-handed, too, she decided to tackle the cuff around her left wrist first. She put the key in, gave it a quarter turn to the right, and … 
presto
, the cuff dropped open! She looked over at me, her eyes huge—almost as big as mine!

“I did it!” she cried after ripping the handkerchief from her face. “Oh, that feels so much better! I can’t believe it worked. How did you know you could open handcuffs with a sardine key?”

With my free hand, I yanked the gag from my mouth and threw it to the floor. “I’ll tell you later … but first, do the other one. I’m going to need both hands to untie these knots.”

She took the key in her left hand and started to work on the other cuff, fully expecting that it would open as easily as the first. That turned out to be wishful thinking. A minute went by, then two, and our wrists remained bound together.

“Let me try again,” I said. She passed the key to me without protest, but I didn’t have her magic touch. No matter what I did, that cuff remained stubbornly clamped to our wrists. “We’re going to have to leave it on for now. We’re running out of time. C’mon—together we can untie
the ropes. We have to stop those two before we get to the next station, or we’re never going to see them or your mom’s necklace again.”

My right hand and Ellie’s left hand picked at Ty’s sloppily tied granny knots (the kind that Father would have scolded me for tying), and within five minutes we were free—except for the handcuff that joined us.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, tossing the last bit of rope aside.

“I have to see Mother,” she said. “She must be so …”

“We will,” I promised. “But first, you have to come with me—to prove everything to them. They won’t believe me. They don’t believe anything I say.”

Ellie nodded, but I noticed that her eyes were a little watery. I think that it was all finally starting to sink in—her being knocked out and kidnapped, the Blue Streak, her mother, everything that had happened in the few short hours I had known her.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you now. And don’t forget, we have Lantern Sam on our side,
if
we can find him.”

Oh, we found him all right.

We burst through the door and had started to race down the hall when I heard that familiar voice in my head.

“Henry! Is that you?”

As I screeched to a halt, forgetting momentarily that I was still attached to Ellie, she flew right into me, and we both tumbled to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs.

“What are you
doing
?” said Ellie. “Why did you stop?”

“I heard Sam. He’s in one of these rooms.” I helped her to her feet, and we quickly shook off the bumps and bruises we’d gained. “Sam! Can you hear me?”

“You don’t have to shout,”
he said calmly.
“Just get me out of here!”

“Out of where?”

“4-C. Hurry.”

“Why’d you go in there?”

“I—didn’t
—choose—
to come in here, you dolt. A feeble-minded …
human
picked me up and
carried
me inside. Can I help it if people find me irresistible?”

“What’s going on?” Ellie asked. “Where is he?”

I put my ear to the door of 4-C. “He’s in here. I’m not sure why.”

“Are there people in there?”

“Will you two please stop wasting time and knock on the door?”
said Sam, getting very testy.

I knocked twice.

“Who is it?” A man’s voice, not at all friendly sounding. “Henry Shipley,” I said.

“What do you want?”

“I’m, uh, looking for my cat. I just wondered if you’ve seen him. He’s a calico—”

The door burst open and I found myself looking up at the face of the man in the gray suit.

“You!” He pointed his finger accusingly at me and then yanked me into the room, with poor, bruised Ellie stumbling in after me. He blocked our exit with his body and demanded, “Who are you working for? Why are you handcuffed? What’s going on?”